US National Cranberry Relish Day
<p>In November 1959, two and a half weeks before Thanksgiving, Arthur Flemming, the United States Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, told a press conference that some cranberries from the Pacific Northwest might be tainted with aminotriazole, a weed-killer shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats. Sales of fresh cranberries collapsed by roughly seventy-three per cent, grocers pulled the fruit from shelves, and President Dwight Eisenhower and First Lady Mamie served applesauce at the White House instead. That panic, now remembered as the Great Cranberry Scare, says something about how deeply the cranberry had embedded itself in the American table by the mid-twentieth century. US National Cranberry Relish Day, marked each 22 November, celebrates the specific, vivid version of that fruit: not the cooked, jellied sauce that slides from a can, but the raw, ground relish of cranberries, orange, and sugar that many families consider the truer article.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-relish-comes-from">Where the relish comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The cranberry is one of only a small handful of commercially grown fruits native to North America, alongside the blueberry and the Concord grape. Indigenous peoples used it long before any European arrived, eating it fresh, drying it, and pounding it with fat and dried meat into pemmican that kept through the winter. The earliest documented meeting of cranberry and settler took place in 1606 at Port-Royal in Nova Scotia, where the Mi’kmaq introduced French colonists to the berry, which they sweetened with maple sugar. That simple act, tempering the cranberry’s ferocious tartness with something sweet, is the whole principle of relish in a single gesture.</p>
<p>Cranberry sauce as a companion to turkey first appears in print in 1796, in the second edition of Amelia Simmons’s <em>American Cookery</em>, generally regarded as the first cookbook written by an American. The book recommends serving the bird with “cranberry-sauce,” fixing the pairing in writing more than two centuries ago. Relish, the uncooked branch of the family, took longer to become a fixed tradition but rests on the same logic: cranberries are too sharp to eat plain, so cooks have always married them to sweetness and a second flavour, most often orange.</p>
<h2 id="a-condiment-with-a-documented-modern-history">A condiment with a documented modern history</h2>
<p>It is easy to assume cranberry relish is timeless and anonymous, but a good deal of its modern story is unusually well recorded. Commercial cranberry sauce, the smooth jellied product, was the work of Marcus Libby Urann, a Maine lawyer turned cranberry grower known in the trade as “Mr Cranberry.” In 1912, in Hanson, Massachusetts, Urann began canning cranberry sauce so that the fruit could be sold beyond its brief autumn harvest. In 1930 he persuaded two competitors, John C. Makepeace of the A. D. Makepeace company and Elizabeth F. Lee of the New Jersey-based Cranberry Products Company, to merge into a cooperative, Cranberry Canners, Inc. That cooperative became the National Cranberry Association after the Second World War and, in 1957, took the name by which it is still known: Ocean Spray.</p>
<p>Raw relish has its own celebrated lineage. The food writer Craig Claiborne published a cranberry relish recipe in <em>The New York Times</em> in 1959 that blended cranberries with onion, sour cream, sugar, and horseradish, a startling combination given the bland sweetness most people expect. The recipe found its real fame through the broadcaster Susan Stamberg, who has read out her mother-in-law’s version, “Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish,” on American public radio almost every Thanksgiving since 1971. When the two crossed paths, Claiborne told her, “Susan, I am simply delighted. We have gotten more mileage, you and I, out of that recipe than almost anything I’ve printed.” A horseradish-laced relish, read aloud annually for half a century, is about as traceable as food folklore gets, and it makes the better point: relish is something families argue over and keep alive.</p>
<h2 id="relish-is-not-sauce">Relish is not sauce</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The distinction at the heart of the day is worth defending. A traditional relish is raw. Fresh cranberries are chopped or ground, usually with a whole orange, skin and all, plus sugar and sometimes apple, walnuts, or ginger, then left to sit so the flavours marry. The result is bright, loose, slightly crunchy, and almost shockingly fresh against the richness of the meal. Cooked sauce, by contrast, simmers the berries until their skins burst and their natural pectin sets the mixture into something spreadable or sliceable. Both have their partisans, and the canned jelly that holds the ridges of the tin has its own devoted following, but the relish camp prizes texture and the clean snap of uncooked fruit. The same insistence on the fresh, the tart, and the bright runs through other contrarian food observances, much as those who mark <a href="/specialdate/us-national-eat-a-cranberry-day/">US National Eat a Cranberry Day</a> make a point of meeting the berry on its own uncompromising terms rather than buried in sugar.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-day-matters">Why the day matters</h2>
<p>A relish day so close to Thanksgiving is really an argument about effort and memory. The canned product is a marvel of convenience, but a homemade relish, ground the night before and left to rest, carries the fingerprints of whoever made it: more orange, a handful of toasted pecans, a grating of fresh ginger, a defiant spoon of horseradish. For many households the appearance of one particular bowl signals that the holiday has properly begun, and the recipe is passed down with small, fiercely guarded variations. Marking the day on 22 November, a little ahead of the feast itself, is practical as well as sentimental: relish genuinely improves after a day or two in the refrigerator, so the cook who prepares it now is rewarded later. It is a quiet nudge toward making the thing yourself.</p>
<h2 id="how-people-celebrate">How people celebrate</h2>
<p>The obvious way to honour the day is to make a batch. Many cooks run cranberries and a quartered orange through a food processor or an old-fashioned hand grinder, stir in sugar, and refrigerate. Others use the occasion to test variations before committing to a Thanksgiving menu, comparing a classic orange relish against bolder experiments with jalapeño, ginger, or that horseradish-and-sour-cream version Stamberg made famous. Jars of homemade relish, deep crimson and glossy, make welcome seasonal gifts, and food writers and home cooks fill their feeds with the colour every late November. Because the relish keeps well, the day doubles neatly as a dress rehearsal for the larger meal to come.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-berries-grow">Where the berries grow</h2>
<p>The relish has a geography as well as a history. Cranberries are grown commercially in only a few American states, with Wisconsin and Massachusetts the dominant producers, followed by New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. The crop is deeply tied to particular places: the bogs of Cape Cod and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey have supported growing families for generations, and the harvest each autumn is a regional event in those communities. Buying fresh cranberries to make relish in late November supports a domestic crop that has very few overseas competitors, since the fruit is genuinely native to the cool, acidic wetlands of northern North America and is difficult to grow elsewhere. The same berry that becomes relish also becomes juice, of course, and its sharp, ruby liquid is the backbone of one of the world’s most popular cocktails, the reason a glance at <a href="/specialdate/us-national-vodka-day/">US National Vodka Day</a> and a glance at the cranberry bog are not as unrelated as they first appear. The brief, intense autumn harvest is precisely why Marcus Urann began canning in the first place: without preservation, the berry vanished from the market within weeks of being picked.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-the-scarlet-harvest">Symbols and the scarlet harvest</h2>
<p>No image is more bound up with cranberries than the flooded bog. Cranberries grow on low trailing vines in sandy, peaty wetlands, and most American crops are gathered by the “wet harvest” method, in which growers flood the beds and use machines to knock the berries from the vines. Each berry contains tiny pockets of air, so the loosened fruit floats to the surface, turning whole fields into shimmering scarlet lakes. Those flooded bogs, most famously in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, have become the defining picture of the harvest and, by extension, of the relish that crowns the autumn table. The deep red of the finished dish carries that landscape onto the plate, a scarlet that no amount of cooking can dull and that survives intact from the vine to the serving bowl.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>A ripe cranberry is buoyant and bouncy because it contains four small air chambers; growers have long bounce-tested berries down boards to sort the firm fruit from the spoiled.</li>
<li>Cranberry sauce was sold to American shoppers in cans from 1912, the work of Marcus Urann in Hanson, Massachusetts, decades before most modern food holidays existed.</li>
<li>The 1959 cranberry scare frightened shoppers so badly that the Eisenhowers ate applesauce at Thanksgiving, while presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon both pointedly ate cranberries to reassure growers.</li>
<li>The most famous American relish recipe, read on the radio nearly every Thanksgiving since 1971, contains horseradish, onion, and sour cream and turns a startling shocking-pink colour.</li>
<li>The first written pairing of cranberries with turkey dates to Amelia Simmons’s <em>American Cookery</em> of 1796, the first cookbook by an American.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>What makes relish worth its own day is precisely that it resists the can. It demands a little chopping, a night of waiting, and a decision about whether you are an orange-and-sugar traditionalist or a horseradish radical. In an age when the holiday meal can be assembled almost entirely from packages, the bowl of hand-ground cranberries is a small, deliberate refusal to take the easy path, and the reward is a flavour bright enough to cut through everything else on the plate. The relish is not the centrepiece, and it never pretends to be; its job is to wake the rest of the meal up. That may be the most useful role any dish can play.</p>
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